I bought this elegantly draped in black and white jacket book when it hit the bookstores in the mid nineties so before Amazon existed. An initial attempt got me half way through and then literally put it on the shelf for twenty years. It's complicated. Laurence Lampert asks a lot of his readers and it is not constructed to be easily understood.In Beyond Good and Evil philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "A man's maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play". This illuminates the Canadian kid's attempt to portray the history of philosophy as a game of leap frog between the traditional Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes to the first postmodern thinker Friedrich Nietzsche. Laurence plays in a castle that warehouses building blocks from around the world and throughout the history of time and as adults we are intrigued at his utilizing so many of the blocks and his celebration of them, but we are confused as to his admission that his work is of only a select few. Is he so strongly committed to expressing what only he can see or is he showing us something that we all should see and just don't realize it yet?Building blocks for Laurence consist of philosophers, writers, critiques, significant historical and political facts and the like. Nietzsche in Modern Times is so abundant with these that this critique cannot but grant him 5 stars just for how much of everything that is interesting is presented. For students who need to write papers or for a bored scholarly mind this book is a jukebox of theses for either an entire dissertation or just to ad a couple of neat facts to illustrate your topic. The title suggests and the book specifically states that it will address a very narrow scope of writings but Lampert ends up being very comprehensive with many additional works presented to defend what he has to say. It is mind boggling to note how many directions Lampert comes from but a good prerequisite is to read the interview with him in Nietzsche Circle.University of Chicago Professor Alan Bloom who taught just 3 hours north of the Hoosier "land of bacon" where LL taught, wrote the national best seller The Closing of the American Minds just five years prior but Nietzsche in Modern Times however it's not mentioned in the 12 page index. Bloom was a Greek scholar, valued Nietzsche the most influential thinker of modern times and focused this epic describing why French thinkers either side with Descartes or Pascal. Is there a reason Bloom's book was forgotten - are these the writings of a "Cassandra".Without discussion, Lampert describes Nietzsche with Descartes instead of Pascal when Nietzsche specifically mentions Pascal as one of the eight most prominent sources of his inspiration in the final aphorism of Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Human, All Too Human), even placing him next to Schopenhauer. If this is only a Poetic expression of Nietzsche's gratitude then isn't he being ungrateful? It might serve best to study Nietzsche as a "polytrophic" Odysseusian in a new European home as well as a Hyperborean and in the end one who overcame the Greeks, each and every one of them.Nietzsche in Modern Times, a Study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche could well have been vivisected into a kaleidoscope of "A reader's guide to" and essays. Uniting them together makes this a masterpiece, the meticulous work of a watchmaker. It seems likely that Lampert is in fact not from Canada or the planet earth, but from a place called Orc. There, rather than aging as we do one gets younger with time albeit wiser. I think that while it is great curiosity with regards to how Lampert chooses to combine these three philosophers, in the future readers will more easily assimilate the material.